In less than 300 words, I want to see your idea of the WORST beginning you can possibly write. The funnier and more creative you are, the better.
This was too fun to resist. I started with the "It was a dark and stormy night" angle, then transitioned to "The alarm jolted him out of bed", but ultimately, I had to go with my gut:
Para-Cliche
Once there was a girl named Martha. But Martha wasn’t like
other girls. Martha had a problem. See, Martha didn’t have two parents, or a
pet cat, or a car named Dear John, or a house for that matter. Martha lived in
the tumbleweeds of a triathlon training ground, and Martha was a fairy.
What kind of parents named a fairy “Martha”? Why, the kind
who proscribed to Better Homes and Better Gardens, and then got themselves
blown up in a car-jacking on their way to meet the infamous namesake of their
one and only child, Martha Stewart.
But that’s not who our story is about.
Cedric, the guardian angel and muse of a certain now-dead
magazine writer, faced the greatest dilemma of his cherubic career. And what is
that, you may ask? His charge was dead. No, worse than dead. He was undead—munched
on by a mindless zombie while snoozing at the Chicago airport between interviews
about the difference of western and eastern influenced garden gnomes.
Returning to heaven now was not an option. So Cedric packed
his red and blue flowered knitting handbag, strolled on down the highway, and
stuck out his thumb, hoping to find someone he could dress up and pass off as
his dead…undead writer.
A sleek black car hissed to a stop on the ice-covered curb.
The privacy-tinted window rolled down and a man wearing dark fifties shades
grinned, flashing a set of sharp canines.
“Good evening,” he clucked through a thick Transylvanian accent.
“Do you require a, uh, lift?”
Cedric thought there might be something strange about the
driver.
“No, I am not a blood-sucking child of the night.” The
driver lifted a hand and ruffle-laced sleeve. “You will be perfectly safe in my car.”
Cedric shrugged and climbed in.
And there you have it--a rip on the Paranormal trend using true and tried techniques that send literary agents running for the hills. Given another hundred words we would have met a werewolf, and perhaps a ghost too. Another two hundred words, we probably would have waken up to an alarm clock on a dark and stormy night. Alas, you can only go so far in 300 words. Oh, and enjoy this Crystal Collier original, brought to you by my liberated inner cartoonist.
So, friends, what's the worst beginning you have ever read to a story?
